the wheat princess

Life Lately: Moving to Connecticut

I’ve been meaning for a while to write a post sharing that we’re moving “down south” to Connecticut 🙂

In March, we purchased 42 acres of wooded land that we’re rather determined to turn into a little farm. A little farm fifteen minutes from Hartford, that is. I’d like to say this is one of our crazier ideas, but we’ve done worse.

Our lives, like so many people’s lives, were upended in 2020. We’ve been working ever since to reestablish ourselves and put down new roots.

The last two years were fraught with changes in friendship and community, challenges with our kids and school, aging parents, navigating work, leaving our church of twelve years, selling the house we remodeled and love, and yes — for all of this — moving to Connecticut.

I’m tired. When I have time to sit and think, I daydream about taking a long walk, napping, or sitting in the sunshine. Someday, maybe 🙂

Until then, we spend our days taking long car rides in every direction for work, church, and school, packing our big house into small boxes for a year in a townhouse, and planning and dreaming about the farmhouse we’ll soon start building on our land.

By this fall, our house should be sold and we should be moved to Connecticut. Our kids will be starting at a new school (and attending the same school for the first time!). And we should be seeing construction underway on our land and farmhouse.

That’s a lot of should’s. But if all those should’s become our reality, I’m confident all the crazy and stress of the last two years will be worth it.

And one thing I’m excited about with all these changes, is sharing pictures and stories of this new adventure. If anything should give me something to write about, it’s building a farm and farmhouse fifteen minutes from Hartford, right?

I named the house we’re in now Abigail — because she’s an old Colonial. Well, I’m naming our next home Little Farm. It will be our little farm in the city, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

Here’s to the next adventure

Posted in Adventures: Travel & Doings, Foundations: Home & Garden
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Go Ahead and Plant

I did a lot of planting last year…

…both literal and figurative. I planted a lilac bush at the corner of the house, dreaming of the day when its fragrance might waft in from the guest room window just above where it sits.

The autumn before, my daughter and I spent a perfectly crisp day dropping dozens of daffodil and hyacinth bulbs into the dirt running along our stone wall. And in the spring, I added creeping phlox beside the bulbs, envisioning countless tiny blooms someday spilling over the sides of the wall.

We put up an arbor leading to the patio and planted purple clematis to climb up either side. My grandmother always had clematis climbing up something at her house, and the fragrance takes me back to her gardens every time.

With every addition to our yard and gardens,

we planted something in our hearts and lives too. Last year held a lot of stressful changes as we navigated decisions about how to plant and grow our family.

I often questioned if we were doing what was best and if we’d ever see anything grow from all the seeds we were dropping into the soil of our lives.

Today, as I sit here tapping out these words, we’re a bit buried in snow from yesterday’s nor’easter. We ended up with a foot of snow and the kids are having a marvelous time digging and playing in it today. Whenever I peek out at them shoveling and rolling in all that fluff, I can’t help but marvel at all the life just waiting beneath the surface.

My daffodils, hyacinth, and phlox still sit resting beneath the cold along the stone wall.

Come spring, my clematis will again climb that arbor and my hydrangeas, mere brown sticks at the moment, will be weighed to the ground in blue, white, pink, and green balls of blossoms.

The air will be rich with the smell of lavender, lilac, and a dozen other things all mingled together. I can’t wait.

And today, even though spring is months away,

I’m thankful for every seed planted, both in the yard and in our family. Nothing blooms all the time, but I see life blossoming all around us every day, with every decision to go ahead and drop another seed into the ground. Good things will grow, each in the right season.

Go get your shovel; you won’t regret it.

Posted in Foundations: Home & Garden
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It Is Good

If I’ve written at all over the last few years, my words have often been heavy with lament.

I’ve recounted the life lessons and hard blows these years have dealt. From the early years of motherhood to lessons learned in relationships, life has not been light on learning opportunities.

In these years of learning, I’ve often felt the weight of my own failures and inadequacies. “If only I could be a better mom.” “If only I’d been a better friend.”

“If only…” these words keep me awake at night, ever reminding of all I’ve done wrong. Every time I get my footing, life washes me out to sea again. “You’re not enough.” “It’s your fault,” my brain screams relentlessly.

This last year nearly pulled me under.

But then, in the darkest hour just before the dawn, I heard words I never expected to hear. The words, 

"You did this...and it's good."

God has not felt like my friend for a really long time. Ever since I became a mom, I’ve felt like I’m locked head-to-head in battle with God. That wrestling culminated this past summer in a moment of absolute brokenness and surrender. I quit wrestling with God and asked him to please take all the things I’m holding and do something with them instead.

I thought God had won.

I guess, I thought that was the point all along. But that’s exactly when his gentleness and comfort began to wash over me instead. That’s when I began to hear the words, “you did this…and it’s good.”

Instead of feeling as though I were locked head-to-head with God, I began to feel him beside me, his arm around my shoulder… looking at what I was looking at and simply saying, “you did this…and it’s good.” I don’t mean that I physically felt or audibly heard him. But I knew his presence. I felt his approval and delight.

I’d walk through the house we’ve worked so hard to rebuild these last nine years, and I’d hear, “You did this…and it’s good.”

I’d put a hot meal on the table for my family and hear, “You did this…and it’s good.”

In the Genesis 1 account of God creating the world, we see a pattern in God’s creative work. First, God makes something. Second, God says, “it is good.”

For example:

“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good.”

Genesis 1:3-4 (ESV)

It’s as if God creates something, steps back with his arms crossed to observe, and says with pleasure, “It’s good, I like it.”

I never thought to see my own life in that same pattern.

Instead, I learned to zero in on all I do wrong, assuming God stands beside me with his arms crossed in displeasure.

And of course, my sin does grieve him. But not all is sin and failing — he delights in me too. He stands beside me, not with arms crossed in anger, but as he did in creation, observing with delight and often saying, “it is good.”

I don’t know what the year ahead holds.

The last two years have been a tempest. But I’m thankful to stand at the gates of a new year with the knowledge in my heart that God stands beside me with pleasure. He sees all that’s done by his grace and enabling and says, “it is good.”

“This I know, that God is for me.”

Psalm 56:9
Posted in Roots: Faith & Theology
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Winter Flower

From the first petal in spring to the last leaf of autumn, my daughter loves showering me with “flowers.” Nothing is too humble or lowly for her notice and admiration. Weeds, blades of grass, and the most ornate flowers equally receive her doting and delight.

Still, she surprises me. When winter sets in and the world is robed in brown and gray, she comes to me all the same, tiny hands full of tiny treasure. “A flower, momma!” Yes, sweet girl, a winter flower.

Dry, and brown, and dead — a weed even in its humble days of living. But you see beauty. And you help me see beauty even in these long winter days.

Posted in Seedlings: Children & Motherhood
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Hello, Goodbye

I’m glad 2021 is over. It was a hard year, harder even than 2020. If I had that information this time last year, I’d have sat my heinie down and cried. I could recount all the things I learned in 2021 and how different I feel on the other side of it. Truthfully though, I don’t feel like it.

Normally, I start the shiny new year off with a trailing list of plans, goals, and to-dos.

I’m very organized and goal oriented and I like checking off all the boxes on all the pretty pieces of paper. But the 2nd day of this shiny new year feels different to me. Yes, I have goals and ideas for the year ahead, but one word keeps pressing into my heart with every beat: contentment, contentment, contentment.

I’ve spent the past few years with so much wanting.

Wanting more, wanting different. Not all wanting is bad. Not all having is good. This year, I feel God asking me to just sit. Be still. Stay, and tend, and grow. Use what you have…look away from what you don’t. Take each next step as it comes. Stop trying to run ten steps ahead to see what’s next.

I assure you, I acted just like the rowdy toddlers you know when I was given such advice. And just like the toddlers you know, I wore myself out fighting, and flailing, and throwing myself on the floor in protest until I was ready to surrender and see if God does, in fact, know what he’s talking about.

One baby step I’m taking toward contentment this year is simply staying off social media.

I’m planning on this blog being the only place I connect online. I’ve never been good at keeping up with the pace of Instagram and other platforms that require daily engagement and short snippets of life. I prefer the longer form of blogs and the freedom to connect less, even if just once a week. I can’t handle the constant “feed” of other people’s lives via social media, and I know my soul needs a break from the scroll.

I hope this time next year, I’ll be able to say I walked peacefully and presently through these days — with joy and contentment, no matter the road we were on.

What do you hope for in the year ahead? I look forward to connecting with you more consistently here going forward.

Sincerely, Kari

Posted in Ponderings: Thoughts & Questions
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Seasons Change

I am not a minimalist. I sit pecking out words at a desk hemmed in by a hundred little shreds of paper attached to a hundred vivid memories. Pieces of my life, tethered to my heart, and taped to the wall to remind me of where I’ve been and of where I’m going.

Pages ripped from my favorite book, a stub from Gusta Pizza in Florence where my husband and I ate again and again during our week there, the words of a cherished poem to remind me of my childhood in the prairies. The stories of our lives strung together day after day after day… and remembered by a hundred shreds of paper hanging from the wall.

We aren’t always conscious of the story we’re writing with all these strung-together days of a life. So many, many days are almost exactly the same, and we get lost at sea in the living of it.

Then, something changes, and we are jolted awake. Are we not all quite awake after 2020? Sometimes, I wonder if we’ll ever really rest again.

For years, my season of life was MOTHERHOOD. All day, every day (and through many nights, too) I mom-ed, and mom-ed, and mom-ed. I very much got lost at sea in the sameness of it all. It was a season that would never end, and certainly, I’d never sleep again.

And then one day, I woke up and the seasons had changed. My children were both in school and I was back at work. And while I still mom very hard and still don’t always sleep through the night, I know without a doubt that what was ended and something new began.

I look back on my early days of motherhood and marvel at their passing. How many times did an older mom say, “it goes so fast.” It does and it doesn’t. Those years were long and hard. And yet, now that they’re behind me, I feel those older-mom words burning a hole in my retrospective heart — it goes so fast.

It is not just motherhood that has me nostalgic. I see the passing of time everywhere these days. In the thirteen years of marriage my husband and I celebrated this summer, in the changing and aging of our parents, in the babies I babysat having babies.

Time marches on and on. We can’t stop it. So, may we live awake rather than lost at sea. May we notice, and cherish, and tape to our hearts the moments we’re given. No matter how it looks today, for better or worse, seasons change.

Posted in Ponderings: Thoughts & Questions, Seedlings: Children & Motherhood
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These Ordinary Days

Thirteen years ago today, I stood in a wheat field and married my husband. Today, Darren is at work and I’m home with our kids. I’ve spent the day putting away laundry, washing dishes, and cleaning up an unreal amount of glue from a rogue craft project. It’s just an ordinary day.

Out of the Ordinary

But I’ve learned one extraordinary thing over the last year of marriage: You should never stop dreaming together. For most of our marriage, dreaming together was easy. We wanted to work and buy a house. We wanted to travel. We wanted to start a family. Check, check, check.

All Good Things

These are all good things, but even good things require a lot of time and energy. And before we knew it, we stopped dreaming together. We put one foot in front of the other, one ordinary day after the other. But our paths were diverging.

Darren had his work and life, and I had my work and life. And of course, we often collided in the middle to iron out details and practicalities. But we weren’t dreaming together.

A Shared Path

I didn’t think too much about it. It was just the season of life we were in with little kids and such. But crazy 2020 showed me something: If you’re not dreaming forward together, you’re likely not moving forward together. A once mildly divergent path can lead to wildly different places if you don’t course correct.

Thankfully, we realized our error and are working on that course correction. We’re finding our way back to a shared path.

Last night, we sat up after the kids were in bed talking about the future. Darren showed me pictures and ideas on his phone which led me to research a few things as well.

As I fell asleep, I thought: we want the same thing. We have the same dream for our future and family. Maybe that sounds small, but it feels like the biggest thing in the world to me right now.

Going Forward

I woke up this morning, on this thirteenth anniversary, not only thankful for my husband, but excited about our future together. Excited to be planning, scheming, and dreaming in the same direction again. And that is the most extraordinary thing in the middle of this very ordinary day.

Posted in Ponderings: Thoughts & Questions
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You Can Trust Me

I always get up early hoping for a few quiet minutes before my children wake up. I’m usually successful at the waking up early part but rarely successful at getting ahead of my kids. They fully endorse Anna’s words in Frozen: “The sun’s awake so I’m awake.” And so they are, every morning at the crack of dawn.

Yesterday was one of those rare mornings when both kids slept in, and I had a few minutes to myself to curl up in a favorite corner. Sitting in the morning light, one thought settled on my heart and mind: You can trust me.

“Me” being God. And I, not being a trusting person at all.

I Can Do This

The last eighteen months have been unusually tumultuous for our family. Even before a pandemic rocked the world, we were wrestling with big questions about hard situations that could potentially change the course of our future. The answers to many of those questions came crashing down around us right in the middle of Covid.

A Sinking Ship

In looking back with the gift of hindsight, I see how desperately I’ve tried to hold everything together these last eighteen months. How firmly I’ve believed the course of our future is entirely up to me. I need to make the right decisions and show up in the right places. I need to have a plan worked out for every aspect of our lives. If I do everything right, everything will be ok.

Sure, I trust God. But I trust myself a lot more. Who, after all, could be more invested in my future and the future of my family than me? I can captain this ship. I can direct our fate. If I just get up early enough and work hard enough and make enough consecutive right choices, then everything will be ok…

Can you feel the exhaustion in those words? I can feel it right down to my bones. Yesterday’s “you can trust me” was a gentle nudge to stop spinning all those wheels and webs.

A Good Story

God whispered in my heart, yes: you can trust me. You can trust me to want good things for you. You can trust me to write a good story for your life. You can trust my heart in the middle chapters when the story is bumpy, confusing, and unresolved. You can rest…in me.

A Still, Small Voice

The day before, I was sorting through boxes of books bound for the thrift store and stumbled across one by Elisabeth Elliot called Keep a Quiet Heart. Elliot had been on my mind repeatedly throughout the week, so I scooped that book up and set it aside. Yesterday, after God whispered all those “you can trust me’s”, I opened Elliot’s book and read the following:

He taught us to work and watch but never to worry, to do gladly whatever we are given to do, and to leave all else with God.

Elisabeth Elliot

Do you ever have a moment with God where you’re like, okaaay…I hear you? I kept reading:

“Every assignment is measured and controlled for my eternal good. As I accept the given portion other options are cancelled. Decisions become much easier, directions clearer, and hence my heart becomes inexpressibly quieter.”

“The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.”

“A quiet heart is content with what God gives. It is enough.”

Elisabeth Elliot

And that was all just in the first few pages. I understand now why God kept whispering Elisabeth’s name in my ear…and why I woke up that morning with such an urgency to sort through all those books in the attic. It was all orchestrated by a still, small voice that I can sometimes hear, but often drown out in my noise and bustling.

And, if God can direct me so specifically to words I so need to read, does he not also direct the much larger story of my life? Can he not make my path straight as promised (Proverbs 3:6)?

I believe he can. I trust he will. Now the hard part, to live like I mean it. To keep a quiet heart.

Posted in Roots: Faith & Theology
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The Long Road Home

Last week, I went to my hometown for the first time in the thirteen years since I moved to Massachusetts. I never meant to be away for so long; that’s just how life worked out. The house I grew up in is gone…sold and torn down years ago. Certainly, that’s a big part of why I’ve never gone back.

Maybe it’s the upheaval of the last year, the rolling waves of dislocated friendship and community, the isolation of a world in pandemic and unrest…I don’t know. All I do know is, I’ve been homesick for the prairies and it was time to go back.

After flying into Kansas City for a reunion, I had one free day to do whatever I wanted. So, I packed my people in a car and we drove out to Higginsville.

I wondered if I’d even recognize the place after all these years, if I’d be able to find my way there. Well, it turns out almost nothing about my little hometown has changed.

We wound down the familiar roads, past all the same landmarks that dotted every day of my childhood. And there it was, just as I left it, Hearthstone Rd.

Our long driveway is the one landmark I most hoped to find intact…and it was…just as I remembered it.

It’s not an overestimation to say that I worked out my faith and theology, who I would love and marry, what my dreams for the future would be, and much more all while pacing up and down this driveway. It now seems a sacred line of earth leading both to and away from home.

All those dreams and plans come full-circle standing here with the man I love (the man who I whispered those very words to for the first time in hayloft on this property).

I watch my children, immediately at home, chewing shoots of grass and gathering dry corn cobs from the field.

And I think of all the places I’ve been since I last walked down this drive. Paris and London and Rome. All the places that are not only dreams, but memories now too.

How much I’ve changed; how much remains the same.

When I left this place at 22, I was ready to go. I’d finished school and was about to get married and move to the East Coast just like I’d always wanted.

What I didn’t know then was just how hard it would be to find my way back. I didn’t know that I’d never again step foot in the house I grew up in or that the barns and apple trees would all be gone by the time I got back. I couldn’t imagine that I’d be halfway through my thirties with children at my side before I’d touch this ground again.

We all make choices — whether to stay, whether to go. And none of us can predict how the dominoes will fall once we set down a path.

I love the life I’ve lived and built these last thirteen years. But I think I’ve finally been gone long enough to understand what I left behind. Paris and London and Rome will never hold the memories in my heart like those of this dirt road.

Posted in Adventures: Travel & Doings
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A Merciful Mess

Yesterday started out as a really hard day. I was ready to give up and forget the whole thing by the time we finished breakfast. We pulled ourselves together and went to church anyway. And by the time we left church, there was some light breaking through the hurt of the morning. Once home, we decided to spend the rest of the day relaxing as a family and went for a bike ride.

That was the right choice. We needed the time outdoors filling our hearts up as a family.

My boys showered me with flowers on a day when I really needed a backpack full of them.

And I thought, life is messy. I used to think there are hard seasons and you just need get through them…and sometimes, that’s probably true.

But more and more, I think it’s not a season at all — it’s just the way it is. Life is beauty and ashes mingled together. There are hard mornings that bleed into merciful afternoons. There’s tears and frustration, joy, and laughter with the same people on the same day.

A lot of life is learning how to gracefully hold both beauty and ashes at the same time. It’s learning to let them both be what they are without trying to pretend otherwise. It’s trusting the heart of God who both gives and takes away.

I’m learning to stop watching for a bend in the road where we come out on a smooth plateau. But rather, to keep my hands stretched out to the One who walks before me and lights my way through every peak and valley. He, the giver of beauty. He, the mercy in ashes.

Posted in Roots: Faith & Theology
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the wheat princess

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